Tagliatelle, not spaghetti, and spin-statistics

Yesterday I received a tip pointing me to this page with animations. This time, the animations on Schiller's site are not about spaghetti, but about tagliatelle, the band-shaped noodles from Italy.

The videos show: tagliatelle are a model for spin 1/2 particles; and, tagliatelle are a model for fermions too! The videos are worth watching. I did not know that tagliatelle are fermions.

The obsession with long noodles seems unavoidable in Schiller's work. But why is he now departing from spaghetti?

More male nonsense

Popes also sell a theory of everything, one that is called "religion". "Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil" said pope Francis in one of his first speeches. 

But the sentence is wrong on many counts. The most important one: the devil does not exist. Jews know that the devil does not exist. Science knows that the devil does not exist. The "devil" is a figure that appears in bad religious comics. How can somebody pray to something that does not exist? 

Catholics must believe that the devil exists. It is part of their belief system. How can a world religion require people to believe falsehoods?

Male physics makes little progress

Peter Woit cites Lykken as a researcher that disagrees with supersymmetry. But males are males: they like dreams. Faster than you could imagine, Lykken replaces supersymmetry with another fiction: dark matter.

Dark matter has even less arguments speaking in its favor than supersymmetry. But it is simpler to get funds for it. So the lesson learned from susy and strings might be: switch to dark matter to get funding! Wait a few years, and they will sell the new collider as a "dark matter research machine".

When will they ever learn to leave the fiction out of science?

How to get more money in particle physics

Particle physicists faces a problem. Given that the standard model is all there is, they don't have a good story to tell. They found no supersymmetry, no mini black holes, no additional dimensions, no GUT, and not anything new.

Do they have bad dreams? Well, they took 50 years to find the Higgs boson after it was predicted. This must have been the slowest discovery in the history of physics. The 50 years were great: they got so much money in the meantime that they lived well. What will happen now? Are they going to argue that we will need 200 years for squarks and similar nonsense? Probably. It worked well in the past.

The Milner prizes show that you can get a large prize even if your theory contradicts facts. Everybody has noticed this. So what will these people do?

1: They will develop a model that cannot be tested by the LHC in Geneva. Thus it cannot be tested for another 30 to 50 years. Such a model is the basis

2: They will develop an artificial consensus. By channeling all attention, all lobbying, all conferences, all the press and the funds to their model, they will live well for another 30 to 50 years.

3: They will be nasty to all people who point out that the consensus model has no experimental backing.

4: They will enjoy all the money: go to conferences, groom PhDs that are devoted to the money distributors, plan and build useless machines, lobby politicians etc. And they will ask for time.

All this sounds familiar doesn't it? They just need a new theory, or at least a new type of string theory, to get all this happening. We just have to wait for the next such article in Scientific American. That is where such lobbying usually starts.

The Higgs is here to stay - and afterwards?

I was to skeptical. The Higgs exists. The new data shown at the Moriond conference is convincing.

Now the exciting question arises: Is there anything beyond the standard model? Theorists claim: yes! Experimentalists have not found anything yet.

If there is nothing left, it would mean that we know everything. Of course, we still do not know the origin of the parameters. But if we knew that, we would know everything about the world. Everything? The same claim was made over a century ago; and it was wrong. Is anything different today? We should know more in a few years.

How to formulate a long bet about unification

I just discovered www.longbets.org. We can put long-term bets there. Can we formulate a long bet, to challenge modern particle theorists? Here is a proposal:

Prediction 1:
No decay, no reaction, and no effect that is incompatible with the standard model of particle physics will be discovered. 

A more satirical proposal:

Prediction 2: String theorists and supersymmetry researchers will be depressed for their remaining life, because no evidence for supersymmetry, higher dimensions, or strings will be discovered.

Lost car keys and dark matter

When my husband does not find his car keys, does he deduce that a supersymmetric particle must exist in nature? I assure you that he does not. But he is not a particle physicist or an astronomer. Particle physicists, astronomers and the media are fond of talking of the "dark matter mystery". It is repeated again and again that the universe has four or five times as much "dark matter" as it has "visible matter".

Also my apartment has more matter hidden in closets than visible matter. But I do not claim that my apartment contains any dark matter. Astronomers claim that they do not see all that there is. That is not crazy. But to build machines on Earth to search for what astronomers do not see in the sky definitely is.

Have you heard of projects to build better telescopes to clarify whether we REALLY are missing something? Or about telescopes to look more PRECISELY? Instead, the particle physics world is full of speculations claiming that dark matter is made of yet undiscovered particles. 

Ok, rotation curves of galaxies are not understood. I also do not understand my husband sometimes. Neither situation is a reason to deduce that supersymmetric particles exist or to search for them.

Ok, the cosmic background radiation measurements suggest that there is much more matter in the universe than matter that is visible. But why must the unseen matter be different from the matter we see and know? I read the arguments. None is compelling. Not one.

The idea that dark matter is different from ordinary matter is a fantasy invented to get funding. And the invention really worked well: researchers got billions to check the so-called "mystery". I wish I would get funds every time my husbands lost his car keys. I would be rich by now.

Money and the search for a TOE

The search for  the theory of everything, the TOE, intensifies. In the spaghetti model website, Schiller added new text:

To verify the strand model definitively, calculations of the standard model parameters are under way. The effort of these calculations is estimated to be a couple of person-years (about one or two PhDs). 

We are all looking forward to the results! Schiller writes that the spaghetti model has explained more about nature than any other competing model. He mentions the following result of his model:

Nature has three spatial dimensions, three gauge symmetry groups – namely U(1), SU(2) and SU(3) – and three generations of quarks and leptons.

I agree; no other theory explains these results yet. Quantum gravity and string theory failed.  And he says that he can calculate the parameters of the standard model. Wow!

We are all used to see, once something interesting happens, that many researchers run into the same direction and start searching in the same spot. But not in this case. A good friend, herself a particle researcher, told me why:

You cannot do research in a topic if there is no money available for this research. No money means that you are an outsider and that you will never get a job with that research. Not even if the topic is worthwhile.

I feel like Cassandra. A woman saying the truth, and no man believing it. Cassandra, you really are my alter ego. Dear men, learn to listen to women!

Fermat's last theorem and the TOE

When Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's last theorem after 300 years of attempts, the world did not change. Nobody fell over in amazement. Nothing special happened. The world continued to turn.

So what will happen when the TOE is available?

(A) - Will people say that we have found God? Will they say that the end is nigh? Will politics change? Will the financial crisis be solved? Will suffering disappear? Will the researcher be canonized? Will books have to be rewritten?

(B) - Will the same happen as has happened for Fermat's last theorem? A few newspaper articles, a few TV programs, and no fame or riches?

It is obvious that physicists have been indoctrinated that case A will occur. But case B is the realistic one! We see how men and women are led astray. Men above all.

There is a difference between the TOE and Fermat's last theorem though. In the case of Wiles, nobody laughed about those who failed, because they were few, and those who failed did not believe that they were on the right track. Instead, in the case of the TOE, the whole world will laugh about string theorists, about supersymmetry theorists, about collider people who wanted to build the ILC and the CLIC, about politicians, and about many other lobbyists.

The search for a TOE has a huge establishment behind it, moving billions of dollars. And one that fears being laughed at. Fermat's last theorem had neither.

The TOE establishment is corrupt, mathematics is much less so. Corruption is also the reason that the TOE has not yet been found: corruption forces people to search where the money is, not where the truth is. But I repeat myself.

From the holy grail to a plastic cup

Is the theory of everything really such a big deal? For decades, every physicist in the world has said so. But are they correct?

If the standard model is valid to almost the Planck energy, then there is nothing to be discovered any more. Maybe the only point remaining is the explanation of the standard model parameters.

If that is all, the TOE is not a holy grail, it is a paper cup. After all, who cares about solving mysteries? People want new mysteries, not solutions to old ones. People want drama, not peacefulness. People want to think that a TOE is like reading the mind of god, they do not want to think that a TOE is just reading formulas.